At present, in Bangladesh we have more than 150 public and private universities. All of these universities are offering undergraduate programs in different subjects. Unfortunately, there is no strong focus in research at undergraduate level at most of our universities. We may claim that research is mainly related to postgraduate studies. This is definitely true.
However, in Bangladesh Postgraduate study is not well established in most of the universities. In such a scenario, we teachers can guide our undergraduate students in such a way that they can grow their interests in research so that they can feel interest for research and postgraduate studies at home and abroad. In most of the cases, a significant number of postgraduate students in developed countries are from developing countries like China, India etc. For example, at MIT in 2019-2020 there were 759 postgraduate students from China and 313 postgraduate students from India. (https://registrar.mit.edu/statist…/geographic-distribution)
If our students have certain level of research outcomes at their undergraduate levels, these will definitely be great assets for them for their postgraduate studies in developing countries as their applications will get additional values. When we are considering research related to our undergraduate students, we should encourage them even the contribution is not so significant. We should never ignore their small research contributions. We must consider them as novice researchers those are just going to start their research. A publication (not at a predatory one) in this regard can give them good confidence. We cannot accept top level publications from our undergraduate students in general although there are some exceptions. Publications at conferences and journals (not predatory) at national and international levels having some indexing can be ok for our undergraduate students. Through this process they will be familiar with research that will encourage them for postgraduate studies.
We can also arrange conferences for undergraduate research and can provide certain level of supports for the participating students. I think this is not a difficult task nowadays. It just requires strong dedication and research environments at our universities. Fortunately, some of our universities mainly engineering universities are doing significantly well in this regard as most of the publications from these universities from undergraduate research.
While considering postgraduate research (Masters, PhD etc.), we must have some strong check points in research outcomes. As for example, for Masters Degrees there should be at least one Scopus indexed journal publication or two reputed conference publications and for PhD and equivalent degrees, there should be at least five publications of which there should be three SCI / SCIE indexed publications. Unfortunately, many of our universities are giving Masters Degrees without proper evaluation of the works of the students. I strongly believe there should be an official surveys from the proper authority to find out the scenarios about the qualities of postgraduate degrees at our universities.
Our faculties should have research collaboration with the faculties of other universities / institutes from home and abroad. This will help us in idea sharing as well as to overcome fund crisis for our research and publications. There is a strong believe among many of our faculties that if a journal charges publication fees, it is not a good journal. However, this concept is not valid at all nowadays. There are many very good journals those charge huge amounts for publications and these journals have very good reputations as well as indexing. Overseas collaboration can help us a lot in this regard. However, these types of collaborations should be for postgraduate research.
Everyone is talking about the rankings of our universities. Our policy makers must understand that research has the most important impacts in the rankings of the universities. We must ensure enough budgets, facilities, encouragements for the innovation and research. In addition, we must have to go through proper ways such as developing very good web portals for each of our universities and uploading all necessary and important information in these portals, sending proper information to the authorities involved for rankings, adapt outcome based learning and many others. We must have to give strong focus to ensure Institutional Quality and follow the steps for achieving accreditation. Each of our universities must have a very good web portal and we have to incorporate all types of information such as detail profile of each faculty, publications, no of seminars, workshops, teachers and students’ ratio and other necessary information in the web portal and keep this information up to date. I think it can play a vital role in rankings of our universities. This is because in many cases the organizations those are doing the rankings look for different information at the university website. My observation is that in general the qualities of the websites of our universities are not good enough. Moreover, very few information is available in these websites. UGC already approved posts for ICT cell for many universities of our country and responsibilities can be given to this cell of each university to keep the website up to date. I think every university in Bangladesh should have an online repository where the university can store the thesis works mainly postgraduate thesis with related publications so that we can get ideas and share ideas among the researchers. Most of the top ranked universities have such repositories.
Finally, we all know that there is a myth and discussion among the people that in past the qualities of our universities were far better than the present scenarios. According to my opinion, there is no in depth analysis in this regard and I cannot be agreed with this observation. Yes, we have many shortcomings at our universities at present as we have more than 150 universities now. Even though there are significant contributions in research from many of these universities. Faculties are doing good research; students are also involved more in research and innovations in many of these universities. Yes, we have far way to go to reach at the level of top ranked universities of the world. Hope to see many universities from Bangladesh at the list of top ranked universities of the world in coming days.
